Economic outcomes, such as sales performance, resulting from marketing actions applied on products and services are generally difficult to predict. Such outcomes can depend on many variables, including general marketing conditions (e.g., consumers' trends), environmental conditions, actions taken by competitors, allocation of resources, strategies pursued in advancing the economic goals, etc. Traditionally, analysts, such as economists and marketing specialists, analyze the data and try to predict the behavior and possible outcomes that would result from pursuing certain courses of actions.
However, even under the best of circumstances, analysts typically only focus on a relatively small subset of marketing variables (sometimes referred to as market drivers) when trying to articulate appropriate marketing strategies and courses of action to follow when marketing particular products and/or services. Furthermore, the formulation of marketing strategies and the methodologies used to arrive at such formulations are generally ad hoc, and a near-form of art.
Although some computer-based applications that facilitate analysis of marketing data are available, such computer-based applications offer only limited help and do not facilitate the entire process of creating viable marketing models, and formulating appropriate marketing strategies based on such models.